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Set Website Goals in 2011

With the New Year quickly approaching, many businesses are beginning to discuss new company goals for 2011 and how they are going to achieve those goals both from a marketing and business standpoint. While most business stakeholders know that the number of searches* and ecommerce transactions** being performed on the internet is growing, often they forget about the need to integrate new business goals into the company’s current internet marketing strategy.

Here are some simple ways to begin the integration process if your business goals include adding a new good or service, or if you’re trying to expand into a secondary market:

Add any new product or service offering to the website.

Expand on any existing goal-related content.

Have your SEO team perform new keyword research on any new goods or service offerings, or refresh your keyword research if it was performed more than 6 months ago.

Update main and secondary navigation to reflect any changes in business goals.

Update HTML and XML sitemaps.

Use an online PR Campaign or Social Media Campaign to help spread the word about new service / good offerings, or about expansion into new / existing markets. Make sure to use keyword rich anchor text in any back links to your website.

Use a Pay-Per-Click Campaign to give you a boost in traffic and conversions while your organic ranking increases.

Should your 2011 business goals be more general and focused around improving the website performance, here are a few additional recommendations:

Make sure your call to action is prominent on every single page of your website.

Improve any pages with a bounce rate of 60% or more by evaluating your keywords and content.

Check website contact information to ensure it is up-to-date, which includes removing employees who have left the company and also sales contacts.

Focus on improved goal-tracking, such as the submissions of forms & emails. As well as implementing phone tracking to better understand how your website is improving.

Create a new content calendar and stick to it. New content helps draw in new business and validates, to your returning users, that you are an expert.

While it is important to set goals, it’s even more important to set yourself up to achieve them. For most businesses, without actively and correctly utilizing internet marketing practices, they will fall short. If you enjoyed this post check out this post about the importance of baseline data. Should you need some help evaluating your current website, you can receive a free Search Engine Optimization Report just by providing a few pieces of contact information.

*Search increased 49% from 2008 to 2009.**Ecommerce Transactions increased by 9% in third quarter of 2010 verses 2009.All data was provided by comScore.